Devon’s sister Rikki was Betty Haynes in her school’s production of White Christmas this month. One of her costumes included a muff and she fell in love with the idea of a muff. A big soft pouch to warm your hands and possibly hold your cell phone and some lip gloss? Awesome. Unfortunately, muffs are not easy to find in this day and age. Since I can knit and my mother-in-law can sew we decided that between all of us, we could make a muff. Here’s the steps if you want to make one for yourself:

1. Go to a local yarn store and fall in love with the coolest yarn you can find. Don’t look at the price, because how expensive could it be? While you are there, decide that this super cool yarn needs to be paired with a carrier yarn to make the finished product a little bit thicker. Pick out this carrier yarn and also buy it without looking at the price. And while you are there, pick up some super fancy circular needles because all your needles are back in Utah.

Super cool yarn. Look at all the different textures. Oooh, cool.

2. Go to JoAnn fabric and find the softest furry suede fabric you can find for a lining. Does it also happen to be one of the most expensive fabrics in the store? Perhaps.

3. Knit the cool yarn and other yarn in a tube on your new, super cool circular needles.

4. Sew the lining into a tube, put elastic in the ends and hand sew into the knitted portion.

5. Put on the muff and admire how cute you are.

Fuzzy soft lining

By this time you may have realized that your muff costs roughly a million dollars. Don’t worry, though. As Rikki has assured us, this muff will be a family heirloom and passed down from kid to kid in your future family.

So this is what it looked like after a few days of constant snow:

It feels like it’s been snowing for days. Oh wait, it did.

Snowfall as of this morning

We made it to Minnesota! Our flight was supposed to get in last night but we moved it up to get in ahead of the storm. Last night we got about six inches, and there are supposed to be a few more waves of snow headed our way before Saturday. It’s definitely going to be a white Christmas!

It seems like Christmas light displays are just a little bit bigger here than they were in Minnesota.

There are your regular, old Christmas lights covering every inch of your house and lawn:

And then there’s the people who go one step farther and coordinate the lights to music:

And the people who go just the extra mile with it (we took our own video but the videos on their website were way better than the ones we took):

Impressive, huh? Yeah, our house has a little wreath that’s not even lit. We figure our neighbors have enough lights to make up for us being lazy.

Who knew elves were so darn messy? Some of the projects are turning out really cute. Others look like a monkey made them. We’ll post pictures after Christmas so we won’t spoil any surprises.

Church was cancelled for us today. That’s right, in a place where no one has to travel farther than 0.5 miles to the church building, they decided that 4 inches was enough to call it a day. Granted, we do live in the foothills and there are some hills to navigate on the way down to the church building, but we got there safely before we met up with someone that said we should have been called about the cancellation. It’s 37 degrees out and the road look like this (because the plow went by yesterday and we probably won’t see it again until Tuesday.)

Oh well, we’re not complaining about taking the afternoon off.

At a Toyota Dealership in Orem

Mechanic: Hi there! Have you been here before?

Me: No, I haven’t. I moved here from Minnesota.

Mechanic: Minnesota? Really? How are you handling the weather here?

Me: It feels almost tropical! It’s kind of nice.

Mechanic: Really, it feels warm? Well, I guess it has been warmer than usually lately. Just you wait, though . . .

Me: Silently picturing this in my mind:

Me: Okay, I’ll wait and see . . .